Here’s an interesting Carl Bass exit interview with Roopinder Tara at engineering.com. If you’re wondering just how much stock Carl offloaded in those planned sales, here are his reported sales of Autodesk stock in the weeks leading up to the resignation:
- 11 Jan 2017 $7,894,150
- 9 Jan 2017 $7,888,768
- 5 Jan 2017 $7,694,038
- 23 Dec 2016 $1,971,715
- 22 Dec 2016 $1,968,935
That’s $27m, give or take. Carl’s reported as having sold over $49m of Autodesk stock over the last three years.
While Carl still has tens of millions of Autodesk stock, dumping that much of it before leaving doesn’t strike me as the actions of someone as supremely confident in the future of Autodesk’s ailing cloud push and rent-or-go-away business model as his words would suggest.
Ahh, has his own Golden Parachute plan. The next news item should be the $800M renovation of the four top level office suites where the shag carpets will be lightly shampooed for an hour. Then Ricky Gere’s character will bid $300 for the scraps of Autodesk.
Apparently you missed the exit interview he gave to Roopinder Tara. He stated multiple times how he and the Autodesk BoD are confident in the licensing model change, and how it is and will be successful, and how there is no chance it will be reversed.
http://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArticles/ArticleID/14351/Carl-Bass–The-Exit-Interview.aspx
You mean the exit interview that’s mentioned and linked from the very first word in my post? 🙂
Nope, didn’t miss a thing. I know exactly what was stated. Autodesk under Carl has repeatedly shown that what is stated and the facts are not necessarily related. If you read that interview carefully and compare it with history, there’s at least one comment that proves Autodesk has been deliberately deceptive for years. More to come on that, hopefully soon.
Carl’s actions tell me a lot more than his words. Sure, he has every confidence in Autodesk’s future under the cloud/rental plan. Sure. That’s why he sold up big and walked away.
Really, presuming that $89 million total remuneration figure is correct having more than half your net worth invested in one stock seems pretty dumb (when you have the option not to).